The Independence of Prosecutors and Government Accountability

Prosecutors are immensely influential in every judicial system, yet very little is known about the impact of their organization. Here we ask two questions: (1) whether crimes committed by public officials are more likely to be prosecuted when prosecutors are independent and (2) whether this effect depends on the integrity of the prosecutors themselves. We use a novel indicator for prosecutorial independence based on data from the World Justice Project to answer these questions. We find that prosecutorial independence favors the prosecution of different types of public officials and that this effect appears to be conditional on the level of prosecutorial accountability.